Attach of the Chiller Theater!

By Dante A. Ciampaglia

Night falls on Syracuse. And while many Salt City citizens are nestled in their beds others are witnessing shocking images of bloody horror, freakish degradation and hackneyed schlock.

Cannibalism. Psychopaths. Strippers. Freaks. Hillpeople. Drugs. Murder. Violence. Sex. Sex. Sex! Something for everybody flashes by at 24 frames per second. Everybody, that is, willing to subject themselves to such fringe entertainments.

These oddities — known as B-movies — attract the young and old alike. And the local purveyor of these askew films is Ron Bonk, a Syracuse native, filmmaker and the owner of Alternative Movies & Events.

His grip on B-movie goers began in 1999 with the first B-Movie Film Festival. The festival expanded after its first two years, but was canceled in its third year because of the events of Sept. 11. The festival re-emerged as a low-key night club event, and then as an online festival, before Bonk brought the festival to the Palace Theatre in 2005 and to larger audiences. Even more people attended in 2006.

For Bonk, the festival has become about more than just showing off-kilter cinema. “This year right here has been my year to educate Syracuse about B movies,” Bonk says. “And I also started to expand outside the B-movie realm.”

Those events include speed dating and various mini festivals, like this summer’s Elvis on Film. Another is Syracuse Unplugged, an event where a local musician will play an acoustic set at 11p.m. then, at midnight, screen a movie of their choice. But they’ll keep the microphone and talk through the movie, “Mystery Science Theater 3000”-style.

While certainly not a B-movie event in name, it is one in the spirit of experience —talking through the film, cracking jokes, reciting lines of dialogue and laughing both with and at the film.

That communal interactivity is crucial to the B-movie, says John Wilson, founder of the Golden Raspberry Awards, an organization that honors bad movies.

“Part of the appeal of the B-movie,” Wilson says, “is the experience of sitting in a dark theater with a dozen — or a hundred — of your friends,” watching movies that “tend to cater to the lowest common denominator, that won’t go artsy-fartsy on you and have an endearing ineptitude about them.”

It’s hard to argue with the endearing ineptitude of the glorious, stripper-pole licking “Showgirls,” a recent midnight screening. Or B-movie impresario Russ Meyer’s “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!,” one of the all-time B-movie greats thanks to its low budget and super-schlocky, bosom-heavy acting.

And you can’t argue with those films’ ability to draw people to them like flies to a bug zapper.

When the Palace screened “Faster, Pussycat!,” manager David Schmitt says the theater was “swarming” with people. And when Bonk brought Michael Berryman, an actor who appeared in the 1977 low-budget horror movie “The Hills Have Eyes,” as part of a double-feature showing the original film and its new remake, over 300 people attended the event.

As Bonk points out, though, “Faster, Pussycat!” might draw 500 people for a midnight showing in San Francisco, as opposed to the hundred or so that attended the screening in Syracuse. But he thinks there is the potential here to reach similar heights. “They just need to know what we’re doing and kind of understand the spirit of it,” Bonk says.

Bonk says that some people hear the term “B-movie” and think of pornography. He wants people to equate B- movies instead with great, non-pornographic entertainment and the birthplace of mainstream stalwarts like Jack Nicholson and Clint Eastwood.

Wilson goes further, saying that some films, like “Rocky” and “Jaws,” begin essentially as B-movies and are able to transcend that label. “Occasionally, something that starts off as a B-movie or a drive-in feature will take off,” Wilson says.

“Sometimes, they can manage to be quite intelligent and take off to the stratosphere and surprise people.”

That’s a rare occurrence. For every one “Rocky” there are five movies like “Eegah” and “Manos: The Hands of Fate,” two dreadfully awful B-movie classics — “Eegah” is so bad that Wilson calls it a “D-movie.”

But those are the films B-moviegoers prowling the street outside the Palace want to see.

The appeal is indelible in seeing “Showgirls” or Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (the screen writing debut of Roger Ebert) and howling at its absurdity.

“They’re not there to study ‘Showgirls,’” Bonk says of B-movie attendees. “They’re there to make it into an event. So they talk it up. They laugh out loud. They say things back. And even then, I don’t think it hurts the B-movie experience.”

In fact, that’s the primary appeal: the chance to leave good sense—and good taste—at the door and act as shamelessly as the mess-terpiece being projected larger than life.

“This isn’t a kicking in the teeth of bad,” Wilson says of both his Razzies and of B-movies. “This is enjoying them because they’re bad. This is a loving of bad.”